Spatial Distribution and Orbital Phase Behavior of Europa's Sodium Cloud

Details Spatial Distribution and Orbital Phase Behavior of Europa's Sodium Cloud Spatial Distribution and Orbital Phase Behavior of Europa's Sodium Cloud

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.2607s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #26.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1026

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Contemporaneous observations of the exospheres of Io and Europa allow a comparative study of their driving escape processes. Optical observations of sodium emission at 589nm provide the highest S/N information on these two tenuous atmospheres. We report on extensive observations obtained in 2007 and 2009 with the SARG echelle spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands. Although Europa's emissions are considerably fainter than Io's, SARG/TNG's sensitivity and spatial resolution allow mapping the structure of the corona and its evolution as Europa orbits Jupiter. Column abundance variation around the orbit provides clues on exospheric origin. Previous observations found a variation factor of five of the sodium emission intensity over the orbit (Leblanc et al., Icarus, 159, 132, 2002; Leblanc et al., Icarus, 178, 367, 2005), and attributed the variation to a net source of sodium at Europa. Alternatively, Cipriani et al., (GRL 35, L19201, 2008) interpreted the variation to transient events in Jupiter's magnetopshere. We will present the more recent Europa data in the context of these competing theories, as well as a comparison against Io.
This work has been supported by NSF's Planetary Astronomy Program, INAF/TNG and the Dipartimento di Astronomia and CISAS of Università degli Studi di Padova, through a contract by the Italian Space Agency ASI.

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